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VIOLENCE AGAINST MEN

VIOLENCE AGAINST MEN : THE UNTOLD STORY OF THE TRAGEDY OF THE LOSS OF THE COMMONS, ENCLOSURE, DESANCTIFICATION, DESACRALIZATION, COMMODITIZATION, LOSS OF MAN’S CONSCIOUS CONTACT WITH MOTHER EARTH, AND HIS SUBSEQUENT SOCIO-ECONOMIC AND MORAL ENSLAVEMENT BY THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION, CAPITALISM, AND HIS CHANGE OF STATUS FROM THAT OF PEASANT AND YEOMAN FARMER TO THAT OF CANNON FODDER TO FEED THE GLUTTONOUS BLOODTHIRSTY FEUDAL OVERLORDS OF GLOBAL HIGH FINANCE AND THEIR WAR MACHINE IN THEIR QUEST FOR GLOBAL MARKET AND POLITICAL SUPREMACY.

I was speaking with a health care provider today at my regularly-scheduled appointment to, as Kenny Rogers once sang in his brief psychedelic dalliance, ‘to just check in to see what condition my condition was in.’ This gentleman is a very compassionate and empathetic service provider in the public mental health system and we talked for about an hour about my impending re-entry into higher education and I ended by broaching the topic of the fairly apparent gender and age gap and imbalance that I will be facing in a community college populated predominantly by young 17-19 year old ambitious women who want to get ahead and do well in life, with a minority of the student body being young men and mature students such as myself being even more scarce.

I expressed my concern at ensuring that I not run afoul of any gender-related conflicts or those of a perceived nature which could be construed as harassment. I indicated that I was now cognizant of the fact that under the law as it stands currently, a person such as myself could be charged with a sexual harassment crime for even looking improperly or for too long at a woman’s body and could theoretically wind up with a criminal record of a sexual nature for such a willfully or even unwillfully perpetrated act of observing a woman’s carnal attributes in an inappropriate manner.
We discussed this for some time and came to the conclusion that I should simply act honourably and with discretion and modesty in all my dealings with all of the student body and faculty and I should have no problem. Not easy when young women these days are often scantily clad, especially during warm periods of the season and often display an immoderate and immodest amount of skin and cleavage as they prance around in their short shorts, halter tops and increasingly display a marked tendency to be brash, verbally assertive, argumentative, provocatively, antagonistically and confrontationally flirtatious in a psycho-sexually aggravating and socio-economically competitive and tight academic and job market, where getting ahead is often more important than being nice or helping out your neighbour.
I guess I’ll have to see what transpires in the fall when classes start and I’m thrown into the pressure cooker for real. But in the meantime I spoke with this gentlemen about my perceived impression that the gender imbalance had now swung too much in the opposite direction and that men had begun to be increasingly marginalized in an increasingly feminized academic and work environment and that the structural unemployment level for work age men in America is over 20% due to plant closures and work age men with lesser levels of formal education and skills finding it difficult to get a leg up in the knowledge economy where women have a greater tendency to excel in office-related jobs requiring verbal skills, logical reasoning, convincing and persuading and generally less physical exertion than a grunt factory job for a man.

My discussion went on to talk about how, despite all this, that the social services sector is still overrepresented from a client basis by women suffering from poverty, oppression, violence and so on. I had to agree with him being faced with the facts such as they are actually in the system. Our session ended and I was exhorted to keep an open mind about such things as I moved forward in this new stage of my life as a future Social Worker. However, I couldn’t help but ponder the reality such as I see it from my mind’s eye from an intellectual analysis of historical fact basis which is borne out every day of my life in my personal dealings in society, such as the job market, school, the health system, politics as well as the personal accrual of anecdotal evidence which has been piling up in my personal inbox from friends, acquaintances and family members, which points to another, as of yet untold story of the longstanding historical and systematic and systemic practice of violence against men and violence in society at large as an instrument of governance and global domination and oppression in the ongoing quest for global supremacy on this planet.

What I’m speaking of is how men used to have a fairly sanctified position in society as the head of the household and who was in conscious contact with Mother Nature by virtue of being a farmer, either a tenant farmer peasant or a so-called ‘yeoman’ farmer who was a small scale freehold landowner who worked his own land and earned his own keep for himself and his family. Gradually however, in the 16th to 19th centuries, the Enclosure Movement gathered speed and most small scale farmers in Britain were forced off their land by greedy landlords who were seeking to maintain and increase the profitability of their landed estates in a sort of pre-corporate era form of corporate downsizing, replacing farmers with sheep which were more lucrative to raise and could fetch a higher market price in the woolen goods market than trying to squeeze rent out of tenant farmers.
So the country sides of Britain and all of Europe emptied out into the cities and eventually into the Americas, where they too eventually emptied out into her cities in the inexorable and relentless process of core-periphery exploitation of our planet’s animal, vegetable, mineral and human resources by an increasingly assertive, aggressive and upwardly mobile industrial, commercial and financial bourgeoisie, who essentially were up and coming commoners for the most part who were probably envious and jealous of the Monarchy’s, Clergy’s and Nobility’s temporal wealth and power and who sought by all ways and means possible, including the time-honoured instrument of war, in this case the newly-minted variant known as ‘Revolution’, ‘Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity’, and that ‘all men are created equal’ and so forth, to justify the violent overthrow of the old theocratic order with absolute monarchy and so forth, and substitute in its place the eventual emergence of corporate plutocratic global bourgeois feudalism.

What was meant by ‘Liberty’ and ‘Freedom’ and that ‘all men are created equal’ was, essentially, in the case of the American Revolution, that all white Anglo-Saxon Protestant men of a certain age, who met the legal property stipulation to vote and to be voted for, were ready, willing and able to fight violently for the almost absolute God-given right to arrogate to themselves as much money, power, property, and prestige as they could, without the King or any government power interfering with them doing so, in the shortest possible amount of time possible and to utilize this right of Liberty and Freedom to fight tooth and nail to preclude anybody else from obtaining it so that they could engage in the same type of behaviour, lest they might have to actually share the fruits of Liberty and Freedom with lesser, unworthy men of lower birth and faculties who might usurp their claim to being the exclusive, predestined and sole inhabitants of the much-ballyhooed City on a Hill.

So basically men of working age became landless proletarians in an Industrial Revolutionary machine, both literal and figurative, in which they had little or no control over the process or conditions of work and their remunerative outcome and were cut off from Mother Earth by virtue of living in an often crowded urban setting rife with squalor, pestilence, disease and sundry social ills such as violence and so forth. This machine was and is essentially predestined to gobble man up and spit him out and supplant him with itself, as machines quickly evolved into ever more complex and fast-moving apparatuses which increasingly produced more quickly and ‘efficiently’ than human power and hence there was a ‘natural’ tendency on the part of employers to reduce the number of labourers to replace them with machines, thereby making man an obsolete anachronism of the productive process, who at best has become a servant or adjunct to the very machines which were supposedly designed to ‘liberate’ him from the sweat of his toil.
Instead, society in the latter part of the 18th and early 19th centuries became increasingly overwrought with landless, unemployed men and their families, who often, in many cases, in the case of the man, ended up enlisting or being conscripted against his will into the armed forces of the realm and having the dubious honour of being sent off to fight in one of His Majesties’ many overseas wars so as to expand and promote the opening up of new markets and new civilizations for British, French, Spanish or Portuguese mercantile interests and thereby in the process better propagate His Majesty’s language, culture, political system and God. Granted, many thousands of men found new opportunities in the Colonies, but many also died in the process and many more were wounded in mind body and spirit by the brutality which they were subjected to and which they witnessed day in and day out.
Karl Marx even wrote almost 175 years ago that he foresaw the marginalization of men in industrial society as physical labour continued to increasingly be taken over by machines and the increasing participation of women in the labour force, as work became less physically demanding, would become a much more dominant force in society than ever imagined, making men of a more common variety ever more marginalized and in need of sanctification through faith, education, skills training, spiritual discipline, moderation, purity of heart, mind, body and soul and a predisposition of conscience second to none when it comes to facing the adversities, challenges, pitfalls, temptations, absurdities, and structurally-construed and willfully carried out processes of very subtle and oft-not-spoken about disparities and inequalities that are currently being organized and carried out against men in this increasingly antagonistic and confrontational climate of gender politics.

All of this is being played out under a leitmotif of burgeoning misandry or ‘male-bashing’ or ‘male hating’ in the public forum, especially in the mainstream media in the form of commercials, TV programs and movies which promote and depict men and boys in an increasingly disparaging manner as being for the most part ignorant, boorish, lazy, feckless, juvenile, sophomoric, immature, irresponsible, predatory, perverted, cruel, inhumane, brutally violent, disorganized, directionless, morally corrupt, and a whole host of other negative attributes too numerous to mention.

Women on the other hand are explicitly being displayed in roles which are designed to show them as assertive, dominant, self-assured, brave, beautiful, gutsy, intelligent, persistent and generally ready to take control of the situation and put everybody in their place, especially the man who needs a good karate chop in the head or a Kung Fu kick in the balls to take him down a notch and show him who’s really the boss.

So basically, men might still be ‘overrepresented’ in upper management and the upper echelons of politics and the military, but you can be sure that the structures are in place to ensure that women are enabled to fight, scratch and claw their way into the uppermost reaches of male privilege and power, to smash the ‘glass ceiling’ once and for all and to finally take their rightful places in the dominant social, political, economic, military and ecclesiastical hierarchy of society, such as it is and such as whatever is left of it, if any, whenever this whole violent process of thesis, antithesis, synthesis, thesis finally plays itself out in the board room, the bedroom and in the killing fields of the world’s wars of conquest, domination and hegemony.

You can rest assured of some things, though: That the life expectancy of women in the western world will continue to decline overall through the next several decades, as the horrific toll on their physical and mental and spiritual health is exacted in the form of higher than ever incidences of breast cancer, cervical cancer, lung cancer, cancers of all sorts, heart disease, stroke, trauma of all sorts due to increased exposure to the horrors of mental health problems, addiction, violence, either conjugal or in war time as soldiers or non-combatants, burn out, suicide, vehicular trauma and so on as they charge headlong into the maelstrom of their sacred quest for the temporal perks and privileges and accolades associated with the trappings of temporal wealth, power, property and prestige.
I often wonder if this is truly what it means to be ‘equal.’ That men and women be pitted against one another in a Godless and merciless battle for supremacy in the realm of temporal domination, that they be made to be each other’s rival and antagonist and potential threat to the other’s temporal wellbeing and fulfillment by virtue of being made to compete for an increasingly shrinking share of temporal and well-remunerated forms of paid employment so as to become main breadwinners in conjugal situations which are increasingly antagonistic from a socio-economic and psycho-sexual viewpoint as they relate to the position and temporal wealth status of each partner in the conjugal union and its greater of lesser tendency to arouse sentiments and behaviours which often directly lead to verbal and physical confrontations over the control of the couple’s sex life, procreation, raising and education of children, enjoyment and management of temporal assets and material wealth and so forth.

All of these things have a greater propensity to become battle grounds and bones of contention in a conjugal situation anytime a woman ends up openly challenging and surpassing her partner’s status as the main breadwinner and the man’s feet are cut out from under him as his sense of identity as the ‘hunter’ in the ‘hunter/gatherer’ equation of traditional society is usurped and the man finds himself bereft of his ability to proclaim of affirm or assert his claim to being a good provider for his wife and children, a role which has been environmentally and genetically imprinted and hardwired into the male psyche since day one.
To subvert or reverse or in any way pervert this natural balance is contrary to natural law and essentially goes against the Divine Plan for what I consider true equality between a man and a woman, which is predicated upon the mutual love and respect, affection and desire to love, honour and obey each other in each other’s realms of sovereign jurisdiction, as per the couples pre-existing skill sets and Divinely inspired attributes in all things temporal and spiritual, be they earning money, rearing children, fixing the house, the car, washing the dishes or taking out the garbage.
Myself, personally, I wash my own bathroom, dishes, clothes, dust, iron my clothes, make my bed, have my devices serviced, my car repaired, wash my windows and cook my own food as well as buying it. I can’t honestly say that I consider anything to be patently classified as ‘women’s work’ or ‘men’s work’, because my upbringing and personal circumstances, including a stint in the Navy, where you most certainly did NOT delegate the task of ironing your uniform every day to a woman (she had enough of doing hers thank you very much), have compelled me to ‘be my own woman’, so to speak, as well as ‘making a man of myself’, by taking upon myself the full responsibilities of both conjugal partners in the discharge of my personal affairs as a single, celibate man on a very modest income who most certainly cannot at this point afford the luxury of a char woman to clean my apartment and iron my clothes like any self-respecting gentleman/scholar/old boy bachelor would likely be depicted as doing in a British or Hollywood movie.

So does that make me ‘marginal?’ I really don’t know anymore. Joe Jackson once sang in a song entitled ‘Real Men’ the following lyrics ‘and if there’s war between the sexes then there’ll be no people left.’ Truer words have never been spoken. I like Joe Jackson. I consider him to be a postmodern prophet of sorts. What I do know is that I’m going to school in about three weeks and I’m faced with these very heavy duty societal concerns racing through my head as I walk through the gates of the hallowed halls of the Lyceum, to hopefully be enlightened and acquire the tools necessary for my eventual and hopefully final attempt at earning an honourable living with my God-given talents attributed to me by the Almighty, for His greater glory and the salvation of humanity, including my own immortal soul, I should add by the way.

What I fear is that I will be exposed not to an environment conducive to an Old World model of the scholar and gentleman as a true man of leisure, knowledge, wisdom and enlightenment towards God’s mystical presence in the world and in my life, but rather yet another example of a desanctified and desacralized environment of bureaucratic technocracy and of emphasis on the institution of higher knowledge as an immense empirical laboratory rat experiment, where the school building itself and all those within it are essentially research subjects in the ongoing process of the development and evolution of the secular socio-economic and political and cultural policy agenda of eclectic and fragmentary and narrow special interest group lobbying and militant social campus advocacy which we seem to have inherited as a lasting and sometimes I think a dubious legacy from the 1960s American campus activist experience, which has indelibly stamped our institutions of higher learning with the questionable status of being hotbeds of secular left wing social advocacy which by nature is skewed against the tenets of the Christian faith and the advancement and propagation of faith-based policy proposals and outcomes, which it usually considers from the outset to be retrograde, outdated, irrelevant, prejudiced, and generally not in keeping with what is currently the main source of intellectual discourse in society, which I feel, being secular, is inherently skewed towards a devolutionary, deconstructionist, desanctified, desacralized, ‘progression’ towards a bottoming out and watering down and undoing of all that has gone before us and which has stood us in good stead by virtue of the revealed truths which are contained in the Sacred Scriptures and the teachings of the Church as handed down by Apostolic Succession to the present day Pope through the skilled and discerning minds and faith of the fathers of the Church, who were able to discern the truths and weed out the heresies contained in the early life of the Church in the wake of the Resurrection and Acts of the Apostles and their eventual passing into the glory of eternity.

Never thought a chat with a health care professional would elicit such a lengthy missive, but there you go. Just thought I’d get it out of my system and into the Cyber sphere for the hordes of humanity (all 182 of you apparently), who follow my blog. Take care folks, God bless and remember, May the Schwartz be with you! (Never mind, you had to see Space Balls to get that one!)